technologically challenged

June 10, 2012

 

Today wasn’t very full of lectures or anything, but quite a bit happened.  After breakfast, we got our cell phones!  A (very) basic Nokia cell phone costs 50 cedis.  A sim card (required) costs 1 cedi, and a data card (also required) varies in price based on how much data you want.  Today, we got 5 cedi data cards.  I bought 2 of them.  So overall, not a bad price to reconnect with everyone!!  It was nice to text people and let them know I’m okay and blog entries were coming soon….maybe.

After playing with our cell phones for a few minutes, we had a demonstration on bucket baths and doing laundry.  The people doing these tasks made it look so easy.  We got to practice on an item of clothing to make sure we were doing it correctly.  After we all managed to master that task, we had enough time before the next lecture to finish the rest of our laundry.  So all of us grabbed a bundle of clothes and laundered outside together.  It was a lot of fun, surprisingly.  I was thinking, if I weren’t under a time crunch, doing laundry by hand wouldn’t be bad at all.  It’s almost relaxing.  I say that now after I’ve only done it once.  We’ll see how I feel a year from now.  The only thing that really bothered me was ringing them out after we rinsed them.  That was a tad straining on the hands after about 5 shirts.  After rinsing, we hung them on the banisters outside surrounding the walkways outside our rooms.  Some people even made clothes lines out of robe and fishing wire.  The clothes were baking in the sun, then we went off to our lecture.

The lecture was focused on our homestay experience.  We were shown a skit of what it might be like once we get there.  Then we had time to ask any questions or verbalize any concerns we had.  It was definitely very helpful.  I’m sure we all had about a million more questions, but the best way to get them answered is actually going to our homestay.  We leave tomorrow morning to Kukurantumi (our homestay/training location).  It’s definitely going to be a huge difference than what we are used to here at Valley View.  We have definitely been pampered here.

Before we went to dinner, I was taking a picture and noticed my screen looked funny.  There were a bunch of vertical lines everywhere and the whole screen had a red tint.  I took a picture, and it came out fine.  After taking a few pictures, the quality slowly diminished.  After waiting a while, the quality came back.  Weird.  I knew Alex majored in Computer Science, so I took the phone to dinner and asked him if he could help me.  He messed around with it for a bit, but determined he couldn’t do anything about it.  Someone suggest I put it in a giant container of dry rice.  I’ll do that…once I find someone willing to give me a giant container of dry rice.  For now, it’s sitting out underneath our ceiling fan (which I am going to miss terribly come tomorrow) trying to dry.  Fingers crossed.  After we ate, a few of us stayed behind and told funny Lou stories.  We weren’t making fun of him at all, just telling tales about The Wonderful Lou.  We want to start a Wikipedia site where people can add stories as they come.  We thought about calling it “The Legend of Lou” or “What’s New with Lou”.  It was hilarious and such a fun way to end the day.

All in all, it was a good day.  A lot happened, good and bad, but at the end of the day, I’m still smiling.  And that is all that matters.